Three Women

Three Women is, finally, a book about listening — about what it takes for an outsider to enter the interior of another woman's want without flinching, judging, or rushing to a verdict, and about how rarely that kind of attention is actually paid to women's longings in ordinary life; by stitching together the very different stories of Lina, Maggie, and Sloane with painstaking reporting and a novelist's intimacy, Taddeo argues that female desire is neither the empowerment poster nor the moral hazard that the culture would prefer it to be, but a complicated, historically shaped, often lonely thing that women carry with them through marriages, classrooms, courtrooms, and dinner parties — and that the cost of refusing to look at it honestly is borne, almost always, by the women themselves.

Lisa Taddeo is an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter whose work focuses on the inner lives of women, the politics of desire, and the costs of being seen — or unseen — by the people around you. She is a two-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize and has written for outlets including New York Magazine, Esquire, Elle, and Glamour, where she has built a reputation for long, deeply reported pieces that move between reportage and a more lyrical, novelistic mode of storytelling. Three Women, her first book, was published in 2019 after eight years of immersive research and became an immediate phenomenon — debuting at the top of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, drawing comparisons to Truman Capote and Joan Didion for its blend of journalistic rigor and literary intimacy, winning multiple awards, and being translated into more than thirty languages. The book was subsequently adapted into a television series produced by Showtime, with Taddeo herself credited as a writer and executive producer. Her follow-up works include the novel Animal, published in 2021, which explores rage, grief, and survival in the voice of a woman fleeing the wreckage of her own past, and the short-story collection Ghost Lover, published in 2022, which extends her preoccupation with the interior lives of women into a series of sharply observed fictional miniatures. Taddeo lives in New England with her family and continues to write essays and screenplays alongside her longer projects.